I am really enjoying the work of Daphne Oram, in a lesson with Gareth we covered ‘Oramics’, her synthesizer and sound producing machine.
Gareth was talking about the Science Museum’s retrospective look at Oram’s synthesizers, with some of the spearheads of the curation saying that Oram at this time was the UK equivalent of Robert Moog in the USA.
I love this demonstration of a Moog synthesizer by Robert Moog.
I watched a red bull music interview with Bob Moog.
“Making stuff in the studio is really great, you know there’s no end to stuff you can put on a CD now and walk around and listen to. This is something fairly new in human history. Up until a hundred years ago or even less music was something we did together you know it was a community activity, the only thing before was live performance and it was for the benefit of groups of people who interacted with each other, I’d like to see that aspect of music flourish in the future. I’m not knocking recorded music, I’m just saying if listening to music is going to be an increasingly lonely activity that we do with ourselves and to ourselves then we are going to miss something very important about being human, the ability to get together and do something as a community in real time.”
Bob Moog, speaking at the Red Bull Music Academy in Cape Town, 2003.
Some of Daphne Oram’s music from the ‘Oramics’ album are very motorik sounding, I find it interesting how with a lot of early electronic music, shuffles and 3/4 time seem to feature more heavily than the electronic music of today. These pieces also remind me of experimental musicians in very difficult fields. The acoustic drum machine made by Moondog for example reminds me of this.
Here is Moondog’s Suite No.1, played by Stefan Lakatos, who has recreated the “Trimba” – a percussive instrument invented by Moondog. It reminds me of some of the electronic percussive synth sounds created by Daphne Oram. I have attached a fascinating interview with Stefan Lakatos who was a student of Moondog’s.
Daphne Oram’s work also strangely reminds me slightly of the super influential and innovative but mentally unstable producer Joe Meek.
I like all of these artists approaches to percussion, each sounds natural but robotic. Joe Meek worked extensively with reel to reel tape, before multi-track machines were invented. He would record a track, then record a new sound with the rest of the track playing in the back. Layering these up to create bigger and stranger sounds. He had a tumultuous relationship with the industry which he couldn’t handle and increasingly gained more paranoid culminating in the shooting and murder of his landlord and his suicide. He leaves behind this at times quite unsettling work, which you can’t help but link with his story. I think these are three completely different innovators of their time, but I feel like a certain thread runs through them.